Budissa Bautzen

Football took hold in Bautzen early enough that a group there formed a club of their own in 1904, calling it FC Budissa Bautzen after the town's Latin name. The name did not stay put for long. It became Sportverein Budissa 04 within three years, then passed through Sportgemeinde Bautzen-Süd and BSG Einheit Bautzen in the years after the Second World War, before settling as BSG Motor Bautzen in 1950. Only with German reunification, in 1990, did the name FSV Budissa Bautzen appear, the one it has carried since.

Between the wars, under none of those names yet invented, the club won the regional Gau Oberlausitz championship eight times in two decades. The club returned to that second tier only briefly, for two seasons in the mid-1970s, and has spent most of the decades since working through Saxony's regional and district leagues, taking the Landesliga Sachsen in 2005 and the NOFV-Oberliga Süd in 2014.

Money rather than results shaped the more recent turn: in 2019 the club withdrew itself from the Regionalliga Nordost. Derby weekends against Bischofswerdaer FV 08 and FC Oberlausitz Neugersdorf still draw the sharper edge of local interest, the Oberlausitz towns measuring themselves against each other regardless of division. At Stadion Müllerwiese, in white and black, the club known locally as Spree-Budissen continues in the leagues its withdrawal placed it in — the same patient, lower-division existence that has defined most of its history since a handful of townspeople decided, in 1904, that Bautzen ought to have a football club of its own.